There are many types of difficulties which children face in the world today and one of it is urban poverty. Kuala Lumpur is the capital of Malaysia and growing rapidly. However, one can still find severe poverty in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.
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When Sinje and the other ambassadors got to know about urban poverty in Kuala Lumpur, they wasted no time on researching with the help from Malaysian Care (local Kuala Lumpur NGO) on urban poverty. Malaysian Care is currently educating and helping women and children in one particular village and according to their statistics, many of the children they are helping are undernourished, affecting their growth and indirectly, their studies. This is due to their family unable to feed them with proper meals and at times, they only have one meal a day which may consist of just a piece of bread or a small packet of rice to be shared among a few siblings.
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After a few rounds of researches and understanding more, they decided to fund 19 children between the age of 7 till 17 years old who are affected by providing them nutritious lunch meal plans on every weekday and sponsoring their tuition fees to improve in their school works. The subjects they will be taking are Bahasa Melayu, English, Mathematics, Science, Geography and History.
A list of kitchen equipments with proper utensils was prepared and bought together with the appropriate food. A cook from the village who has been supportive was hired to cook for these little children. Sinje managed to have Mr Puah Howe Keat, a good friend to sponsor the kitchen utensils like refrigerator, freezer, rice cooker, stove, plates, cups and et cetera while HOPE Education Foundation funds the monthly food and cooking’s costs and tuition fees.
The project was organized and within a short period of time, the kitchen was set up and funding started in August 2010. This project will run for a year and monitored closely. Sinje visited and kick-started the nutritious lunch program on 11th August 2010. She had a fun time knowing and chatting with the children there.
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During her visit, she also had a chance to understand one family, *Nurmah’s situation. Nurmah is a mother to 7 children and a wife to a drug addict. She is currently the only breadwinner of the family and has difficulties in life as she has to work and also care for her children. Her wages as an Alam Flora worker is only as low as RM500 a month and with a low pay, it leaves her nothing towards the end of the day as she needs to pay for her house rental, utility bills resulting in her children being hungry all the time. Nurmah is also illiterate and cannot speak very well thus, resulting in her children not being able to speak, read and write properly as well.
This is a big issue and therefore, hoping that with this program, the mother will have one lesser thing to worry in life. Towards the end of the visit, Sinje shared the story and strength of The Little Yellow Flower with the children encouraging them to always stay strong no matter how hard life can be!
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*Names has been changed for protection purposes.
